Hugo Cantin

Hugo Cantin is a Montreal-based artist, designer, cinematographer and film collector whose work has met with remarkable success since exhibiting with Arteria. Cantin creates linear-patterned collages using vintage film stock, which he illuminates with LEDs in elegantly-wrought wooden and metal light boxes. His work achieves a keen, sophisticated aesthetic from a design standpoint, even as Cantin weaves highly intuitive historical narrations into his splicing of found film.
Inspired by the psychedelic and by mid-century figures and movements, Cantin effects dream-like meditations on some of the twentieth century's most captivating and iconic images, such as those of Elvis, Warhol, New York City, the Russian moon landing, and the pin-up girl. Cantin's titles often provide poetical juxtapositions to the spirit of pastiche in his work, enticing the viewer with the pleasurable sensations of the "hypnotic" and "vanishing ephemera." Although his light boxes distinguish themselves as decorative objects of taste and style, it is Cantin's sensitive, finely-tuned rendering of time on a flat surface which lend his works their luminosity and depth.